Page 90 of One Last Summer
Her eyes were sincere and regretful, and I knew she hadn’t purposely gone out of her way to sabotage this break she’d made me take. But that almost made it worse; despite her speech and her adamant insistence that I log off and focus on myself, Four Points was still expected to come before all of that. Before my own needs. Before me.
“I got a chance to check out the rundown you sent last night, and it looks great,” she said with a smack of her lips, freshly glossed in rosy, shimmery pink. “It seems like even just a little break got your creative juices flowing again.”
“Yeah, I think the time off definitely helped me figure some stuff out,” I agreed with a nod.
“Clara!” Lydia had arrived with the rest of our creative team, clad in a head-to-toe lime-green pantsuit and trendy platform sneakers. She clasped a hand to her mouth when she realized I was having one-on-one time with Amaya and made herself busy with Abe and whatever stack of handouts he’d brought for the meeting.
“Gabbie’s beyond excited.” Amaya kept chattering away as the receptionist waved for us to follow and then led us farther into the office. “I guess anytime I need you to nail a job, I’ll just send you away to the woods for a week. As soon as we’re done here, let’s talk about your role on the team, okay?”
“Yeah, that sounds great,” I agreed, trying to muster up some excitement about my future at Four Points. She was all but announcing that a promotion was in my future, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to care.
Thankfully, the sight of the conference room’s glass wall set my adrenaline off like a cocktail—shaken, not stirred. The rush of the pitch, the thrill of the sell; these things still drove me. There was nothing quite like knowing an idea you’d created, carved out of thin air and shaped into something special, had the possibility of being brought to life. This was the part of my job I still loved, no matter how burnt out on the rest of it I was.
Getting people excited about the magic of what could possibly be was what I did best. No matter what self-doubt I struggled with, I knew this in my bones. And judging by the confident, beaming smile on Gabbie Pereira’s face when we entered, Amaya had been right. This pitch was in the bag.
“Hello, Four Points!” she bellowed, chic silver bangles clanging on her wrist as she waved us in like I’d seen Oprah Winfrey do on old clips of her holiday episodes on YouTube. She had the confident, no-nonsense vibe of someone who grew up dealing with customers in her parents’ coffee shop—which was something she touted in almost every interview of hers I’d read. Next to Gabbie were two white dudes with practically identically groomed beards, just trimmed enough to be clean-cut but still long enough to appear rugged, like they could have just been casually chopping wood before walking into this meeting. They nodded their hellos.
“Thanks for having us!” Amaya shuffled around the table to greet Gabbie with a half-hug reserved solely for business acquaintances whom you’ve gotten drunk with a couple of times.
She slid into a chair directly across from me. “I’ll let Clara take it from here, since you’re already acquainted with her ideas for your Summer Ale launch.”
Amaya’s eyebrows knitted together ever so slightly, a flicker of something that looked like annoyance shadowing her face. Maybe the non-stale version of Clara hadn’t really been what she’d wanted, after all.
With a nod over to Delilah, who was hunched over her laptop, running the presentation, I stood and pushed my chair in, smoothing the creases in my skirt one last time.
“I’ve spent the last several days with old friends,” I said, delivering the words I’d written in my initial outline, practically word for word. “They’re the kind of people everyone deserves to have in their lives, the ones who have cheered me through my best moments and loved me through my worst. Sometimes we don’t talk for months or see each other for years, even. But when we’re together, the inside jokes come flooding back. The stories and memories we shared and made this last week—sometimes with Alewife beers in hand—had us laughing for hours, often to the point of tears.”
I motioned for Delilah to switch to the next slide, the photo I’d taken on our first night back at Pine Lake. My friends were blurry shapes around the campfire, the sun a distant memory behind the pines.
“At one point I thought to myself, ‘God, if only I could bottle this feeling.’ And that is exactly what Four Points can and will invoke with Alewife’s Summer Ale, if you hire our team to launch this exciting new product.”
“I absolutely loved that your inspiration came from your own life.” Gabbie rolled up the sleeves of her blazer and nodded along eagerly, as Amaya’s gaze flicked between the two of us, clearly pleased with how this was going.
“Yes, it all came to me after spending the week with dear friends.” I swallowed down the fireball of emotion that was trying to work its way out of my body. I was seated at a pristine table at one of the most influential companies in Boston, facing my dream client. The new account, the promotion—it was all about to become mine. Except I didn’t really want any of it. Not anymore.
Maybe I never had.
I just needed to get through the meeting. Then I could figure out my feelings.
One more hour.
I cleared my throat and tried to push forward, focusing on Gabbie’s keen face.
“We want to not just tap into that nostalgic summer feeling most of us have, but to offer the promise of new memories to come, with Alewife being the perfect catalyst.”
“Love that,” Gabbie said as she rested her elbows on the table, leaning in. “The play on friendship as a selling point feels very authentic, which is what we want.”
“Yes, it—”
My phone buzzed in my bag, causing me to jump.
“Sorry.” I bent down and grabbed my phone, swiping through to the message. “One second, let me just shut this off.”
Clara I’m in labor.
My hand shook slightly, head pounding. It was Sam.
For real this time.
